Saturday, 11 February 2017

A couple of thoughts on ISIS videos

You know, by now I
should be used to it, but even after binge-watching ISIS videos for a couple of
years now, I still can’t get over some things. To wit:

1. The extreme production
values. You watch battlefield videos from literally any other source – any at
all, including the Syrian Army, Hizbollah, the moderate cannibals, the US Army
even – and they’re raw, blurry, jerky, often out of focus. ISIS? You’d think it
was all done meticulously in a studio with the help of highly competent special
effects specialists. Not just a little – all
of it. When you watch an ISIS drone filming an ISIS suicide bomber car dodging
rockets along a highway as he drives towards a helpfully marked target, you get
the exact same ultra-high-definition video as you get when they show
multiple-camera angles of blood spurting from a prisoner’s decapitated corpse.
You’d think, with all the combat they’ve been in, the production values would
slip sometimes, but no such luck. And it all comes complete with weaponised
music soundtracks that get into your head and won’t let you go.

I mean that. ISIS music is a secret weapon. You don't even have to understand it to have it echoing inside your head, nonstop, day after day after day.

Nor does it seem to
matter just where the videos originate. I’ve watched ISIS videos from the
following places: Syria, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Indonesia. And
you know what? They all have the same
ultra-high production values. A Boko Haram video from Nigeria might have
black men in it lecturing the camera, while one from Afghanistan might have
horseback-riding ISIS men in the misty mountains (really; I am not making this
up), but they’re made to the exact same standards as one from a Mosul
battlefield.

You’d think all those
videos went to the same studio to be processed by the same people.

It’s not just the
production values. Websites which post ISIS videos, like Heavy, typically also
post photo teasers a few days in advance. Sometimes one video has a trailer of
the next video tagged on at the end. Yes, I said trailers. As in movies. Which means that one video is planned and
ready before the previous one is released, and they’re building anticipation.
Creating a market.

Someone tell Hollywood
that they’ve been out-Hollywooded, and that there’s going to be a Jihadi Oscar
next year or the year after. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

(You’ll note that I’m
carefully avoiding saying that they know all about it already.)

2. Then, if there’s one
thing you learn from watching ISIS videos – and reading its literature – it’s
the extreme hatred it has for other Muslim groups, be they Shia like Hizbollah,
or even fellow Sunni militant groups like the Taliban (yes, ISIS absolutely hates the Taliban). This makes it
especially ludicrous to listen to Western Islamophobes treat Muslims as though
they were a unified and indivisible block out to conquer the planet. They can’t
even stand each other for ten seconds – who the hell are they going to conquer?

But of course it makes
for great drama, doesn’t it? Lovely theatre? Reinforces all the prejudices you
care to name, and sets up a “clash of civilisations” where none was before?

3. I still can’t
comprehend just whom these videos are supposed to influence to join ISIS. I’ve
grown jaded enough to be able to tolerate the sight of people getting executed
by anti-aircraft guns (beheading is now passé for ISIS) or crushed by a tank,
but that still doesn’t show me anything more than the obvious fact that these
people are insane psychopaths. Let’s assume I show you a film of myself and a
few friends chopping off heads and blowing up churches and mosques. Then I tell
you, “Hey, come on, join us. It’s fun!”

A direct correlation
to slasher films is tempting to make, but doesn’t work. Yes, slasher film
villains gain a cult following, especially among immature young males. I myself
used to rather like Leatherface and Hannibal Lecter. But when bloody Jason
Voorhees is chasing you with his ice hockey mask and machete, he’s still only a
movie monster. He isn’t going to chop your head off.

ISIS is most assuredly
going to chop your head off.

So, who, exactly, are
these movies meant to influence? Since from all indicators ISIS doesn’t
actually depend on the videos for recruitment (Twitter, its online magazines,
and word of mouth seem to be its primary outreach programmes), what does it
mean to do with them? Scare potential opponents? That’s not a viable answer
because, y’know, potential opponents can be prevented from getting scared by
just...being stopped from watching the videos. And watching people’s heads
being cut off gets old very fast. It’s not possible to keep being afraid.

The only answer I can
come up with is that the videos are meant for two things:

First, branding. ISIS
is marking its territory in the information warfare age. It’s putting its story
out first, and in the most effective way. When you watch an ISIS man literally
climb on an Iraqi tank to drop a grenade through the hatch in the middle of
battle, you find it harder to believe that someone like that can be defeated.
Killed, yes, defeated, no. It’s readying the fight for the long haul.

Secondly, and,
probably, more important, is the deliberately cartoonish villainousness of ISIS.
I can’t state enough how cartoonish this is. If you have ever read any badly
drawn 1970s comic with an Evil Mastermind, or one of the worse Bond film
villains, you’ll recognise ISIS at once. You’d almost think they were
deliberately trying to make themselves as stereotypically evil as possible, and
as crudely violent...even though their violence is from all indicators no worse
than that of the al Qaeda franchise Jabhat al Nusra or the “moderate”
child-beheading rebels of Harakat Nour ad Din al Zenki. Those other gangs do
things like impale Christians on crucifixes in churches, play football with
decapitated heads, shoot women on camera, and behead sick 12 year old kids on
video...things even ISIS doesn’t depict itself doing. But everyone stays
fixated on ISIS.

Perhaps...just
maybe...that’s the whole point? To make the other gangs look good by
comparison?

Maybe I’m being
paranoid, but I wouldn’t be all surprised.

*******************************

Some screenshots from recent ISIS videos:

Here, a captured BMP armoured personnel carrier fixed up as a tank bomb goes on its final mission in Deir Azzor, Syria.

Here, dramatically posed ISIS members launch a bomber drone into the misty dawn near Mosul, Iraq. Yes, ISIS has bomber drones, and can use them quite effectively:

Here, in Anbar, in Iraq, an ISIS drone videos an ISIS car bomb destroy an Iraqi Army outpost. The explosion was, in typical ISIS fashion, played multiple times in flashback.

2 comments:

I fear I haven't been able to convince myself to watch the Daesh videos. I haven't even looked for one. Your review is terrifying. How do they manage such production values? Who is helping them?

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead And the white knight is talking backwards And the red queen's off with her head Remember what the dormouse said -- White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane

The MSM, the official source of reliable, factual reporting, seem full of fake news. sott.net and rt.com are officially fake news, but I haven't seen anything not well documented. RT lies by omission, filling their half hour of news with all the crimes committed by the West and skipping the rest, but those crimes are well documented, yet they're all called lying Russian propaganda.

The official version of Trump's first Seal raid is that US Seals bravely went into a Yemeni village to retrieve extremely valuable intelligence they could use to protect the Yemeni innocents from the murderers. The Brave Seals were attacked by terrorists in a school, a hospital, and a mosque, so they called in air strikes. Yes, many women and children were killed, but all were armed terrorists who killed one Seal and wounded several more. Not one civilian was injured by the US. Students, teachers, doctors, nurses, and patients were all terrorists shooting at the Seals.

Not every MSM sticks to the official version as they always did when Obama was president and questioning any of Obama's official reports was racist. Now it's OK to question the official version, and most say Trump botched the operation and was responsible for the deaths of 8 innocent women, 8 innocent children, and one brave, innocent Seal.

I very much like Walter's take on this: https://comicskingdom.com/kirk-walters/2017-02-09

It does make a semi-sane human (me for one) stop and wonder how these supposedly ignorant clowns manage to churn out such high quality video. Maybe they do get a good bit of help from Hollywood film studios. Stranger things have happened before Bill.

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